Super Saints

What else would I post about today but the Saints winning the Super Bowl. Who Dat!

I wasn’t a Saints fan from the beginning like so many others down here. I moved to the New Orleans area in 1986 and certainly became a fan then. And the Saints had some good years at that time under Coach Jim Mora. Mora always had great defenses and generally less than stellar offenses, and we won quite a few games but could never get over the hurdle of winning our first playoff game.

That first playoff win came under Coach Jim Haslett, but while we had a pretty exciting offense over the next couple of years it seemed like the team got out from under Haslett’s control and we just couldn’t be consistent. In fact, that lack of consistency has been a consistent trademark of the Saints during the years that I’ve been a fan. Too often it seemed to me, that when we needed someone to step up, many players took a step back instead. Rooting for a team like that can be agony year in and year out.

But when Sean Payton came things took a turn for the better. He put together a staff and a team in which there were lots of players ready to step forward when needed. Not only ready, but eager to step forward. The culture sure has changed for the Saints over the last four years. Now you don’t hear people saying that: “The Saints found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Now, even when the Saints are down, as they were in the first quarter against the Colts, you still think, and ‘feel,’ “we can do this. This team may lose at times, and they may make mistakes, but they just don’t give up.

The Super Bowl showed, too, that this is as genuine of a “team” as I’ve ever seen in the NFL. Sure Brees was the MVP for the game and I would never say he didn’t deserve it, but every player on that team did their part. Pierre Thomas made a great run for a touchdown. Bush got a couple of needed big runs. Colston made some hard catches. Lance Moore made an incredible grab for that 2-point conversion. Porter got the interception. Greer played so well they didn’t even throw in his direction. Vilma crushed some runners. Shanle and Fujita did too. The offensive and defensive lines played their hearts out. Shockey caught a touchdown. David Thomas caught a ball. Bell made a good run. Hartley set a field goal record. Our special teams covered well and recovered that onside kick.

And the coaching staff did a wonderful job. Payton and his crew came to either win or lose, not merely to show. They coached an aggressive game that paid off with this young and aggressive team

This team definitely deserves the recognition as “Super Saints.”
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All Good Things: Or Almost All

Generally, good stuff going on at the moment. First, my mom had to have the batteries in her pacemaker changed yesterday. It’s supposedly routine, but nothing is quite routine when you’re 93. However, they didn’t have to put her under deep anesthesia and she came through fine and is already home. She has developed “Shingles,” but is being treated for that.



Second, Choice Words has been released by Borgo Press. The book is edited by Robert Reginald and is subtitled: “The Borgo Press Book of Writers Writing About Writing.” Besides the fact that I always enjoy seeing new books come out for writers, I also have three essays in the book. These are reprints. Two of them come from Write With Fire and the other from Writing in Psychology: A Guidebook. The last is a collaboration piece, of course, with Elliott Hammer and Du Bois Irvin.

Third, the new Illuminata is up and looks very interesting this month. My essay on “Evolution of a Genre” is included. You can download it for free here. If you haven’t signed up for the free newsletter you can also do so on that same page.



Fourth, I just finished reading J. Bruce Fuller’s 28 Blackbirds at the End of the World and I raved about it over on Goodreads. Below is what I said there:

I originally read this collection in manuscript form and enjoyed it very much. I gave the author a blurb, which appears on the back cover. Here's what the blurb says:

"J. Bruce Fuller's "28 Blackbirds" is to haiku what Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is to apocalyptic novels. A masterpiece."

I stand by that.

The printed version has a great cover, as seen above, and contains a short introduction by the author. If you like haiku, especially connected haiku on the same theme, you will surely enjoy this book. All the haiku revolve around the theme of blackbirds surviving, and sometimes dying, at world's end.

Here's one of my favorites:

world burned black
the hearts of men are black
blackbird's eye is black

If you're interested in the collection you can get it from Bandersnatch Books

Fifth, the Saints are still going to the Super Bowl. And I think that’s enough good news for one day!
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Book and Movie Reviews

Lana and I watched Inglorious Basterds and both thought it was way too long. I know Tarantino often includes two separate story lines in his movies and this was the same. Unfortunately, I didn’t think they meshed well in this case. I later watched Jennifer’s Body myself, a horror movie. It wasn’t the greatest story ever told but far better than Inglorious Basterds. I enjoyed it enough to watch some scenes over.

I read When Gods Die by C. S. Harris (Candice Proctor) and enjoyed it much. This is the second in the Sebastian St. Cyr regency mystery series. The first in the series was What Angels Fear and it wowed me with great atmosphere. The second one really got me caught up in the characters. I also read Brom’s The Devil’s Rose, referred to as an illustrated novel. It’s a short novel, about some souls escaped from Hell and another doomed soul who is hunting them. I enjoyed it pretty well and liked the art a lot. I’ll probably try another by him.

I read Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant and found it beautifully written, although I wasn’t caught up in the plot as much as I wanted to be. I’m also still reading King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a short story collection. There are some good ones in it, but quite a few tales seem a bit overly long and slow to me. Not sure why I’m finding a lot of King’s stuff to be slow these days. Maybe my attention span is really starting to go.

As for writing, I could have been doing more. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit lazy. My writing got a nice mention on The Cimmerian Blog, though. Much appreciation to Miguel Martins.
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When Cliché Rears Its Head

Clichés are clichés for a reason. They’re often the first thing that occurs to a writer when he or she sits down to tell a story. You reach for a word or phrase and what leaps out at you is the thing you’ve heard a hundred times before. It comes so easily that you hardly notice it. It sounds right because your ear has been bludgeoned too often with it before.

Defeating cliché requires constant vigilance. No one is immune. Recently, I was told by an editor that my phrase, “a thought punched her” should be changed because thoughts can’t literally punch. This is true, of course, but the editor’s suggested replacement was “a thought struck her.” I’m sure “struck” seemed better to the editor because of how common it is.

And so we come to my latest faux pas. In my critique group today, someone commented about the “cornflower blue eyes” of one of my female characters. I laughed because I thought they were making a joke. Then I realized I had indeed described the woman’s eyes as “cornflower blue.” And I had no idea.

Looks like I’m due for another pass through this manuscript.
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Writing Class on Style: APA Style That Is:

Today in Writing class we focused on APA Style, which is the set of rules developed by the American Psychological Association for presenting a paper to psychology journals. We require all our classroom papers to be turned in using this style, to prepare the students if they go on to a graduate program in psychology.

APA style is pretty boring to discuss, but it’s one of those apprenticeship things that psychology majors need to learn. When I was in undergraduate school at Arkansas Tech University, back in the early 1980s, we weren’t required to use APA style. I didn’t learn it and, as a result, the first paper I turned in for a graduate school class came back with a “D” on it. The teacher told me the content was worth an “A” but that APA style was part of the requirement and it was on the syllabus, in the fine print. Indeed it was, and that was the last time I made that mistake. I got hold of a manual, the 3rd edition, I think, and learned the style on my own.

We’re on the 6th edition of the style manual these days, and it’s four times as thick as it used to be, partly because of the need to talk about electronic and online sources. I tell the students that they don’t have to memorize APA style but they need to memorize where and how to look up the answers to questions they have about the style. And, I tell them they need to take it seriously.

About five years back in a Physiological Psych class, I had the students do an APA style paper and I got one paper turned in at the end of the year that had completely ignored the requirement. I’d been much more directive about it than that first graduate professor had been for me. I not only put in the syllabus in bold, underlined print, and called attention to it all of the first week, but I covered the basic style information in class and stated, very clearly and loudly, at least five times during the semester, that their paper had to be APA style. The paper in question was a “B” paper but ended up with a “D” because of the style issue. The student came in to complain. I asked him if he’d paid attention to the syllabus and he said, “Yes, “but….” I asked him if he’d heard me say time and time again that APA style was required, and he gave me a, “Yes, but….” I asked him if he hadn’t heard me say numerous times that I was going to take off points if the paper wasn’t in APA style, and he said, “Yes, but I didn’t think you meant it.”

I meant it!
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Saints in the Superbowl

Most folks probably know the outcome already but I can't help but talk about it. For the first time in their HISTORY, the Saints won the NFC Championship and are going to the Super Bowl. They had to beat the Vikings with a field goal in overtime to do it.

The Vikings played a hell of a game and outplayed the Saints in yardage gained. But they suffered with turnovers, both interceptions and fumbles. Some were sloppy ball handling but the Saints defense caused a few of them as well.

One thing the Saints did well was pressure and hit Bret Favre all night long. He took a beating and you know he's a tough guy to be able to walk after that one. Neither team gave up on this one. They fought until the end.

Brees had more time to throw but he and his receivers didn't connect as easily as in the past. The Saints offense definitely wasn't hitting on all cylinders. The Saints also got more than their usual share of penalties. I thought there were a few bad calls against the Saints, but we also got a couple of calls that went for us as well so I figure it leveled out pretty well.

Overall, I'm just very proud of the team and they way they fought through this year. As people have been saying, this ain't yo mamma's Saints. I'm not even thinking about the Super Bowl. Not yet!
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Peeve

My peeve this week is unnecessary work!

My work week is usually pretty busy, and perhaps because we were off on Monday, this week has been particularly hectic. Other than simply reading through 5 pages of my novel and making some minor corrections to it, I haven’t written a word in three days. I’ve not been able to get through more than about a 100 pages in the books I’m reading. Even at night, I’ve been doing school work.

So, when I’m backed up like that, the arrival of unnecessary work really chaps. Here’s some examples.

1: IRB STUFF:

A: I had an IRB (research) proposal to approve, one among many, and I finished reading over it and wrote the approval letter last night. This morning I mailed the approval letter. Not 10 minutes later an email request came in from the researcher to change something in the project. The approval letter that I spent time constructing is now a waste. I have to do another one. Between receiving the first proposal and the new changes, 2 days passed. Couldn’t the researcher have put a little more thought into their first effort so that one letter would have sufficed?

B: I got a proposal from a researcher at another university who requested that I accelerate my normal approval process because they had already bought their airplane ticket to come to Xavier to collect the data. Because they were asking for approval via email rather than by sending me a hard copy, I had to write a contract for our review. I’m required by law to keep hard copies of all submissions and I don’t want to spend my own money printing out hundreds of pages of material. So, I spelled out how I could help them under certain conditions. Two days later I get an email from them saying they were no longer applying to Xavier for approval at present. They’d discovered that they needed IRB approval from their own university first. Time writing contract = wasted. Couldn’t they have checked their procedures for how to do their own research first?

2: WRITING GROUP:

A: One writing group I’m a member of is a critique group. We email our material to a listserv and then print it out on our own for consideration at the next meeting. I sent some stuff in for a review. The day before our meeting, I get an email from one of the members asking me to resend. Now, everything we send to the listserv goes into the archives, and is probably in this individual’s personal email somewhere anyway. But because they didn’t print it out when it came through, they probably lost the email with the attachment somewhere in their inbox. Rather than taking the time to find it, or digging through the archives, they just decided to ask me to take a few minutes to resend. This individual is retired, btw. I’m not.

B: This has happened several times in the past and happened again this week. Someone submits a piece for review. I dutifully print it out, read, make my comments in preparation for our meeting. And then I get a second email a few days later with a “revision” of the previously submitted piece, usually with a note saying: “please ignore the first version you received and respond to the new version.”

All I can say is: ARGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Thanks for letting me rant!
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